Tags: gaming

This might be the best Google hack yet. For April Fools’ Day you should be logging into Google Maps where you’ll find that the streets can be transformed into a playable PAC-MAN maze. The whole game’s there, from Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde the ghosts, to cherries and strawberries, and all the classic digital sound effects. Good luck being productive with the rest of your day.…

The Gameboy was the most popular handheld video game device of its day. After its 1989 release in the United States, Nintendo sold its entire shipment of 1,000,000 devices within a few short weeks, and has sold more than 118 million since its inception. With all the Gameboys sold, there are understandably a lot laying around. So what will you do with your old one? You make it even older with a dose of steampunk!…

Here’s some tactile nostalgia… but it might give you seriously sore thumbs. Spanish photographer Javier Laspiur has created a trip through the game controllers of yesterday, capturing a familiar, first-person view of many well remembered systems from the last 3 decades. A long time fan of gaming, his series doesn’t record the year the device came out, but instead makes it personal, tracking the first year he laid hands on each system.…

You’re probably familiar with the 3rd person view in all sorts of video games… even Mario Kart used it. With a viewpoint placed just behind and above the character you’re playing, it gives you a clear understanding of where you are in a virtual space – something a first person view doesn’t always communicate so clearly. Now, two Polish designers have created that unusual perspective in real life – thanks to an Oculus Rift, and two GoPros mounted high on a custom backpack.…

If you were a gamer in the early ‘90s, you probably remember raving about the awesome graphics. It seemed like the future was right around the corner, about to pop into full color photo realism… I mean, just look at Jean-Luc Picard’s head!

To see how ‘real’ each of those games really was, Brother Brain (aka NYC artist John McGregor) has done movie/game mashups, showing us an animated look at how the old games measured up to reality… or at least a promotional picture.…

Just the thought of romance novels conjures up thoughts of the cringe-worthy images printed on their covers. From shirtless muscled men riding white horses, to passionately swooning women in period costume, it’s hard to find a cliche more hilariously worn. But what if those impossibly romantic scenes were replaced by the coin-collecting, dot-eating heroes from our favorite classic 8-bit games? Shutterstock sent their massive catalogue of images over to illustrator Echo Chernik, challenging him to create a Valentines series that would make any gamer feel romantic.…

Just when you thought your mission to save the princess was in the bag, along come’s anti-Mario propaganda from the mushroom kingdom: “The Koopas are Fighting, Why Aren’t You?” Each of these 17 posters, including the new 7 just released, pay homage to the iconic propaganda posters of WW2. Planting a Victory Garden? In this case, the plants fight back!…

When it comes to the task of creating 3D images of interiors, complete with furniture and a myriad of colors and textures, the job until now has been highly labor intensive. Now, a new system called Matterport is doing that same job in only a matter of minutes, and making it almost as easy as using a point and shoot camera. The devise, based closely on the Xbox Kinect (in fact the prototype was literally this), uses twin lenses on a hand held unit which connects to a laptop. By simply walking around the room and “painting it,” a mass of depth and color information is collected and interpreted into a 3D environment.…

If you are a cartography buff, or really dig on some good old strategy gaming, then this game is for you. Like a new take on the classic board game Risk, the gaming site Major Command is quickly attracting a rabid fan-base of map hungry strategists from around the world. Their mission? Conquering the world by dominating their enemies.…

If this doesn’t get your role playing thumbs twitching, nothing will. Jude Buffum’s evolutionary biology of Hyrule details 200 of ‘the most important’ creatures from The Legend of Zelda video game series. He’s even included a list of binomial Latin names for each of the species and notes that each forking branch indicates an extinct common ancestor of the species that follow.

The piece is titled Magna Arbor Vitae Deku (translated “The Great Deku Tree of Life”) and was offered as a VERY limited 15 print series at this years SUPER iam8bit in Los Angeles. Game on!…